Life After Yahoo Site Explorer API

I have a tool that helps evaluate the quality of domains. When there are millions of old domains to buy you can’t look at them all manually so you need something that can filter out all the crap.

For the last couple of years i’ve been a big user of the Yahoo API. Lots of accounts and proxies meant our domain tool was performing 50,000+ backlink checks a day. Amusingly, you could generate your own API keys without the need to register, just add lots of proxies - http://www.packetflip.com/

Finding a good alternative to the yahoo API proved tricky. Yahoo allowed us to grab the first 50 backlinks of a domain with a single call. The bonus was these 50 tended to be the best links so were enough to quickly evaluate a domain. This proved perfect for what we wanted.

So i turned to the SEOMoz API, quick and simple to get running and so far hasn’t complained about out aggressive use. For me the problem with SEOMoz was the metrics “Domain Authority”  and “Page Authority” . These are far too often flagging domains as good when a quick glance at the links shows they are some spammers cast offs. (still a bloody brilliant API and for FREE)

Next i turned to the Majestic SEO API, for this we needed a Platinum account – at £250 its a bit pricey, but for that you also get much larger reporting quotas. Problem here was similar to SEOMoz, Majestics AC Rank often scored some nasty domains far to high.

The good news is if you combine both “Domain Authority” , “Page Authority” and “AC Rank” you suddenly get most of the low quality domains removed. We could do further analysis on the links of each domains but these 3 simple metrics are proving good enough for what want.

All you need now is a big list of domains to check, but that’s another post.